Examining Group Work: Implications for the Digital Library as Sharium

Digital libraries have the potential to be rich interactive environments or "shariums" that support students who work in groups to complete course work. To understand how DLs might realize this potential, the processes of a single group working on a complex project over a semester were analyzed. Findings suggest that groups perform a range of tasks including administrative, communication and information seeking and retrieval, and use multiple tools and artifacts to accomplish their work. Over the course of the work, activities shift from the individual to group illustrating the need for a complex system that intertwines public and private work space. Currently DLs provide only one tool search that a group might use, but do not fully support groupwork.